Evening Brief: Gearing up for a fight

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The Lead

Facebook failed to protect the privacy rights of many of its Canadian users in last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Canada’s and British Columbia’s privacy commissioners concluded in a damning report released Thursday that followed a yearlong investigation.

Federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien and his B.C. counterpart, Michael McEvoy, said Facebook failed to obtain “valid and meaningful” consent from certain users that had installed a third-party app allegedly to have been discreetly used to harvest their personal information for political purposes, along with the users’ friends.

The privacy commissioners concluded that Facebook was unable to demonstrate that the app obtained proper consent for its purposes, including any political purposes, or that the company made reasonable efforts to ensure that the app did try to obtain fair consent from its users. That failure extended to the friends of users who had installed the app, the report stated.

The brain trust behind the conservative group that helped to unseat the Ontario Liberals in 2018 has unveiled their federal counterpart aimed at taking out Canada’s Liberal government.

“We want to defeat Liberals all over the country,” Canada Proud founder Jeff Ballingall told iPolitics in an interview.

Ballingall, who is also the founder of the highly effective group Ontario Proud, said that while there’s overlap in people behind the scenes, the two are separate entities. But the pages do share each other’s content.

Canada Proud, incorporated at the end of March, has a five person board including Ballingall, Matthew Burns, Nicolas Christopher Spoke, Catharine Sloan and Ryan O’Connor. Three of the five (Spoke, Ballingall and O’Connor) also serve on Ontario Proud’s board. The provincial version of the organization dominated the online world in last year’s Ontario election — to the benefit of Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives and detriment of the Liberals and NDP. Marieke Walsh has this story.

Those of us in the nation’s capital will want to keep our eyes peeled on the forecast tomorrow morning.

With recent downpours already causing flooding in low-lying communities near the Ottawa River, Mayor Jim Watson has declared a state of emergency for the city. It comes after Environment Canada issued a special weather statement for the Ottawa area warning of significant rainfall Friday. Watson said on Twitter that he made the declaration to help “city crews, volunteers and residents in affected areas,” and has requested help from the province and military.

The federal carbon price will generate $2.6 billion this year before rising to over $6 billion in 2022-23, though rebates from Ottawa will exceed the additional costs for most households, says Parliament’s spending watchdog.

The study by the Parliamentary Budget Officer projected the financial impact of the fuel charge and pricing system for large emitters imposed by Ottawa in four provinces, suggesting revenue from both streams would start to decline within five years as emissions declined. This comes even as the price per tonne of emissions produced rises from $20 in 2019 to $50 per tonne in 2022.

Provinces that use more carbon-intensive energy will have higher costs per household, though Ontario, which nearly quadruples the population of the three other provinces combined, will account for about 75 per cent of the overall revenue collected this year, according to the PBO. Marco Vigliotti has the full story.

The Trudeau government is banning oil and gas work, mining, dumping and bottom trawling — an industrial fishing technique that indiscriminately scrapes the bottom of the ocean surface — in designated marine protected areas.

Fisheries and Oceans Minister Jonathan Wilkinson announced the new protection standards on Thursday, while also naming a 12,000-square-kilometre stretch of ocean off the southern coast of Newfoundland and Labrador the site of the country’s next — and largest — marine protected area. It will be known as the Laurentian Channel Marine Protected Area.

The new protection standards stem from the recommendations of a government convened panel which called on Ottawa to adopt the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s standards and guidelines for all marine protected areas.

A spokesperson for Minister Wilkinson confirmed to iPolitics that the new protection standards will apply going forward, while existing MPAs in which these activities are currently authorized will be “reassessed as part of their regular management review cycle.” Vigliotti also has this one.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry told Forests Ontario the day after the Progressive Conservative government delivered its 2019 budget that the 50 Million Tree Program was being eliminated.

Rob Keen, CEO of Forests Ontario, said that since 2008 more than 27 million trees have been planted in the province because of the program, saving landowners up to 90 per cent of the costs of large-scale tree planting. Planting the trees, he said, started as a carbon sequestration program, but also helps clean the air and water, protect shorelines and reduce erosion.

The federal government’s inaugural report on tax expenditures analyzed by gender — now required under a new law — found Canada’s personal income tax system slightly narrows the wealth gap between men and women, but notable disparities in earnings continue to persist.

The analysis, released by Finance Canada on April 11 as part of its overall annual tax expenditure report, reveals the share of income held by women after federal income tax system was applied was 1.9 per cent higher than their share of pre-tax income, using tax information from 2016.

Both men and women stand to gain from federal benefits and tax exemptions, but tax credits are generally found to have a more positive impact for women, especially the Liberal government’s new Canada Child Benefit. While a progressive income tax rate structure also helps to redistribute wealth to women, men benefited more from changes made to income for tax purposes as well as certain exemptions such as the one offered for lifetime capital gains.

Non-tariff related trade barriers are continuing to impede this country’s grain industry from reaping the full benefits of the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement between Canada and the European Union, a new report from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce says.

“The experience in the crop sector has been mixed in comparison to total Canadian exports to the EU,” reads the report, titled CETA Issue in Focus: Opening opportunities in the Canadian crop sector.

Canada and the EU signed CETA on Oct. 30, 2016. The deal has been provisionally applied since September 2017 as the agreement has not yet been fully ratified. Prior to CETA, agricultural trade between Canada and Europe was valued at some $3.5 billion annually. Under CETA’s provisional application, almost 94 per cent of EU tariff lines are duty free. Kelsey Johnson has the story.

Former United States vice president Joe Biden announced today he will run for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential election.

Biden, 76, was former president Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008 and 2012, and was previously a longtime senator from Delaware. This is the third time he’s running for president, with past campaigns in 1988 and 2008. He announced his candidacy in a YouTube video.

The longtime staple of American politics will marshal his experience and global stature in a bid to lead a party that’s increasingly defined by a younger generation that may be skeptical of his age and moderate politics, according to the New York Times. He’s also already ahead in the polls.

Biden enters the race with a number of lingering controversies, but has lately expressed regret with some of his past views and actions.

Obama also isn’t giving his close friend an endorsement at the outset, but as CNN reports, he didn’t talk Biden out of running among the most diverse slate of candidates the party has ever seen. There’s currently 22 people running for the Democratic ticket.

Donald Trump also decided to weigh in on Biden’s decision to run, calling him “Sleepy Joe” on Twitter.

Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan government today revised down the death toll of the Easter Sunday bombing by 100, to “about 253,” BBC reports. Officials blame the erroneous figure on a calculation mistake.

Police are continuing to carry out raids on the island nation and have issued photographs of seven people wanted in connection with the attacks.

Also, the U.S.-backed assault to drive ISIS from its Syrian capital Raqqa in 2017 killed more than 1,600 civilians, a figure 10 times what the coalition has acknowledged, according to a new report.

The investigation was published by Amnesty International and monitoring group Airwars today. The groups urged top coalition members to “end almost two years of denial.” Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser at Amnesty, said, “Many of the air bombardments were inaccurate and tens of thousands of artillery strikes were indiscriminate.”

“Coalition forces razed Raqqa, but they cannot erase the truth,” she said, as reported by Al Jazeera.

French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed tax cuts, a reform of the civil service, and the introduction of proportional representation in response to the yellow vest movement.

He acknowledged a “lack of trust” in the establishment and that “fair demands” are at the core of the movement, as the BBC reports. Protests began in November in response to a rise in fuel costs.

Last week, Macron also said he would close an elite school which has trained several French presidents, including himself. Macron’s announcement was delayed after the devastating fire at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris.

Lastly, another cyclone is slamming into Mozambique, the coastal African country still reeling from a major storm last month that left 900 people dead and three million people in need of humanitarian assistance. The new storm, Cyclone Kenneth, is expected to bring storm surges of up to five metres.

Communities in northern Mozambique and the southern Tanzanian region of Mtwara are being warned to seek higher ground and shelter, as the BBC reports.